Over 10,000 of broadcasters and journalists from around the globe were in specially-designed camera boxes, or crammed into expensively rented office space and balconies overlooking the flag-lined route, while others took their places in the crowd. About 200 TV cameras were all covering the Event.
But only when you got near Buckingham Palace, the banks of temporary TV studios that had been set up next to Canada Gate shows the scale of the media operation for the
royal wedding became truly clear. It was biggest audience in TV history.
More than 36 studios, for broadcasters including the
BBC,
Sky News,
ABC,
NBC,
CBS and al-Jazeera, were housed in the three-storey structure, with outside broadcast vans and other equipment taking up so much space that part of Green Park had been closed to the public.
Two cherry pickers had been set up facing the palace and another broadcast box had been set up by the 82ft Queen Victoria Memorial, for a prime view of the royal balcony kiss.
Inside Westminster Abbey, seated beside the 1,900 guests, were 40 broadcast cameras, 12 still photographers and 28 reporters from national, international and regional media.
There were an estimated 8,500 journalists in London for the marriage of
Prince William and Catherine Middleton, 6,500 of whom are officially accredited by the palace. There are more than 100 overseas broadcasting organizations, most of them from the US.
The BBC, whose round-the-clock coverage was anchored by Huw Edwards at Canada Gate, had the biggest broadcast presence with around 550 staff at a cost of £2m. Ed Stourton was the only journalist broadcasting live from within Westminster Abbey, providing commentary for BBC Radios 4 and 5 Live.
The US networks sent some of their biggest names to anchor the event, including Katie Couric of CBS, Diane Sawyer of ABC and Brian Williams of NBC.
US broadcasters had also invited a host of British pundits and celebrities to provide the accents and knowledge, including Piers Morgan, Martin Bashir, David Starkey, Patrick Jephson, former equerry to Diana, Princess of Wales, and Colleen Harris, Prince Charles's former private secretary.
Chris Hampson, international news director of NBC News, said: "This is the biggest and the most advanced technical broadcast we've ever done. It is comparable to the US election coverage."
There were two reasons for the huge investment, Hampson said. "First of all we're a very varied organisation, we have a Hispanic channel, we have Access Hollywood, we have E for Entertainment, so we need more people here to provide coverage across the board. Secondly, there's a very big appetite for a royal story, probably a bigger interest than in the UK."
Carolina Valladares, the presenter for Colombian cable channel NTN24, which goes out from Canada to Argentina, said: "In Colombia they cannot understand how a democratic county can still have a
monarchy. They are fascinated by this. In Colombia and Venezuela they love celebrities. In Argentina … well in Argentina, they think it's all a bit stupid."
By the time Prince William left Clarence House, British viewers had two hours of Royal Wedding broadcasting..
Following special requests from a string of US networks, Buckingham Palace stayed lit up until 12.30am, an hour and a half later than usual, so that the palace facade will be illuminated as millions of Americans sit down for prime-time evening bulletins presented live from London.
The US Networks began their coverage at 5am on the east coast or 3am on the west, hoping for a share of up to 2 billion people estimated to be watching, a figure which dwarfs the 750 million who watched Charles and Diana's wedding in 1981.
British historian Robert Lacey, who was in prime position in front of the abbey, said he had been working for ABC for at least six weeks. "Until last week, Americans were crazier than we were. They've asked me to do a lot of the historical stuff about the abbey, poets' corner, how the transepts work.
"A lot of us are providing thoughts and information that is news to others around the world.
"In the royal field I honesty think that the only journalist who has ever had any genuinely inside information is Andrew Morton with Diana. I just hope the rest of us are talking common sense.”
BBC figures said that the ceremony was watched by an average audience of 19.2 million across BBC One, BBC One HD and BBC News Channel. The estimated figures for the BBC and ITV put the wedding in the all-time top 10 most-watched programmes (24.5 million), although more people watched the 1966 World Cup Final (32.3m) and Princess Diana's funeral in 1997 (32.1m).The wedding between the Prince of Wales and Lady Diana Spencer in 1981 attracted 28.4m viewers. The BBC's live stream of the Royal Wedding crashed just as Middleton (now Princess Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge) began to walk down the aisle at Westminster Abbey,
according to reports. YouTube's homepage maintained 100 percent availability and a fast response time of 1.24 seconds" during the Royal Wedding, AlertSite reported.
"However, for people who went directly to YouTube's official Royal Wedding Channel, the experience was different. The Royal Wedding Channel page had an average availability of 74.26 percent with 10.34 second response times. Most of the timeouts were related to restarting the live video stream."
"Royal Wedding" spiked as a trending topic at about 4 percent of all Twitter traffic during the event,
according to Trendistic.com.
Livestream told PCMag that the 300,000 concurrent viewers of its wedding stream at 6am ET were a record for the company, breaking its previous concurrent viewer’s record of 130,000 viewers for the Oscars earlier this year by more than double.
The Royal Wedding was the Biggest outside Broadcast and I wondered why? The Answer is because William’s the Legacy of Diana.
